She explained that when sea ice melts in the Arctic, the water
temperature increases. When that happens, the air becomes moister and is
more likely to form cold fronts.

According to the China Meteorological Administration, in December
most of China suffered colder weather than usual. On Dec 24, frequent
cold fronts led to temperatures in 21 monitoring stations hitting record
lows.

And the cold weather is going to return. A new round of cold fronts
will hit most parts of the country on New Year's Eve, bringing mild to
medium snowfalls to Northeast China.

Kang Zhiming, weather forecaster of the National Meteorological
Center, said weather models showed the temperature will not rise until
late January.

"The weather authorities will keep a close eye on any changes in the
weather, especially before Spring Festival, in order to give timely
information to transport and related departments, particularly in the
event of extreme weather," Kang said.

There are more details with regards to how cold the cold is in this China Daily article from a couple of days ago:

It's been a while since we had a first couple of signs of winter weirdness, back in October, when superstorm Sandy took a 90 degree left turn due to a ridge of blocking highs along southern Greenland, and some cold air spilled from the central Arctic over Europe, bringing very early snow to the old continent.

This time the weirdness seems to have hit Russia. Now before people start accusing me of alarmism or hype: I'm only singling out extreme weather patterns, like WACC-y weather, anomalous snowfall on the Northern Hemisphere land masses, outbreaks of cold air, atmospheric blocking patterns...

So is the weather in Russia of the past couple of days extreme? Here's what RT has to say about it:

Russia is enduring its harshest winter in over 70 years, with temperatures plunging as low as -50 degrees Celsius. Dozens of people have already died, and almost 150 have been hospitalized.

The country has not witnessed such a long cold spell since 1938, meteorologists said, with temperatures 10 to 15 degrees lower than the seasonal norm all over Russia.

That article was released 4 days ago. Here's one from AFP from yesterday:

A deadly cold snap has claimed 88 lives across Russia,
officials said Sunday, as Moscow authorities told schoolchildren they
could stay home to avoid the frigid temperatures.

Temperatures across the capital region were expected to drop to
almost minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit) in the night.

Aside from the 88 people who have perished, another 538 people needed
hospital treatment, Russian news agency Ria Novosti said, citing a
medical source.

The agency said seven people, including a child, had died in the past 24 hours.

An official with Moscow's education department told the Interfax news agency that younger children could stay home on Monday.

Russia has been in the grips of an intense and unseasonable chill for
the past 10 days or so. Temperatures have fallen to below minus 50
Celsius in eastern Siberia, and minus 20 in Moscow.

The temperatures are 12 degrees lower than seasonal norms, with such chills not normally arriving until January or February.

The vicious cold snap has also claimed lives across eastern Europe.

Authorities in Ukraine, which has been battling heavy snowfall for
weeks, said Friday that 83 people had died of cold, with 57 of the
victims found on the street.

Here's another article on Agrimoney.com reporting on consequences for winter grains production. The combination of extreme cold and no (insulating) snow is not good for crops.

I used the NOAA ESRL daily mean composites page to check sea level pressure patterns for the last 10 days and this is what showed up:

The whole fake skeptic propaganda effort disguised as 'leak' is
boring me to death, but of course it's interesting to have a sneak peek preview of
the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and see what they will have to say about Arctic sea ice. Geoff Beacon from the Brussels Blog
already had a go at it, and found some frown inducing remarks. But for
the sake of chronology I'm starting with first things first.

From the Summary for Policymakers:

The average
decadal extent of Arctic sea ice has decreased in every season since
satellite observations commenced in 1979. The overall decrease in sea
ice extent over the period 1979–2011 has been 3.9 [3.7 to 4.1] % per
decade with larger changes occurring in summer and autumn (see Figure
SPM.1). There is robust evidence of a decline in ice thickness, and in
ice volume. The overall mean winter thickness has about halved between
1980 and 2009 {4.2.2}.

This, of course, is correct,
and should give any sensible person pause. Given the magnitude of the
event, the rate at which it is progressing (see long-term graphs), and the uncertainties with regards to possible consequences
(in other words: we don't know what the worst case scenario could be),
it's clear that just this short paragraph in the SMP (Summary for
Policymakers) is enough to warrant some serious policymaking, which, I'm
sorry to say, is not in favour of business-as-usual. Well done, IPCC!

But then, further on in the SMP, we get this:

There
is very high confidence that climate models realistically simulate the
annual cycle of Arctic sea ice extent, and there is high confidence that
they realistically simulate the trend in Arctic sea ice extent over the past decades. {9.4.3}.

Very high confidence? I don't know about that, but before going to Chapter 9 let's first have a closer look at Chapter 4: Observations: Cryosphere, section 4.2.2.1:

Greenland's glaciers and ice sheet have become an integral part of this blog. Perhaps it should be renamed to ASIGIS blog? ;-)

This clip from the Chasing Ice documentary has been doing the rounds lately. It's showing the largest iceberg calving ever filmed, with 7.4 cubic km of ice crashing off Jakobshavn Isbræ:

I'm guessing the calving took place in June of this year, basing myself on this CAD image that commenter Werther had made at the time (and I used in the Dark side of Greenland blog post). It shows the glacier's retreat since 2011, with the 2012 June event in red:

Back then I wrote:

Those are pretty big calvings, but strangely enough, I haven't seen any reports anywhere (of course, the Cruise-Holmes divorce must take precedence).

Better late than ever, eh? Especially when it's accompanied by awesome footage.

[edit: commenter Perwilainen has very convincingly explained that the footage is from 2009. Keep those cameras rolling if you want to film an even bigger calving event]

Speaking of Werther.. He made another CAD image, a very detailed one using the LANCE-MODIS satellite images of the Arctic, showing the boundary of the ice sheet (click for a very large version):

Another month has passed and so here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center:

Last month I wrote:

The 2012 trend line isn't quite hugging the 2011 trend line as much as
the latter hugged the 2010 trend line, keeping a polite distance. It's
still 1069 and 1537 km3 below 2011 and 2010 respectively. Hopefully the
trend line starts pulling up a bit.

Unfortunately, it seems the trend line didn't pull up and has stayed in position, still 1099 and 1136 km3 below 2011 and 2010 respectively.

Here is Wipneus'
version of the same graph, for the first time with a calculated "expected" value for 2013 (dotted
lines), based on the same date values of 1979-2011 and an exponential
trend. A caveat from Wipneus: "Note that the statistical error bars are quite large."

Some of the data concerning last summer's impact on the Greenland ice sheet has been released in a first paper by M. Tedesco, X. Fettweis, T Mote, J. Wahr, P. Alexander, J. Box, and B. Wouters:
Evidence and analysis of 2012 Greenland records from spaceborne observations, a regional climate model and reanalysis (PDF).

Overall, in 2012 ALL of the considered parameters (albedo, bare ice,
surface mass balance, melting, total mass change, etc.) set a new record!

Records all around, not just for the Arctic sea ice. These two graphs say it all:

Daily time series of the cumulative SMB (Gtyr−1) using 1st of January as a reference for 2012 (dark blue), 2011 (light red) and 2010 (green) and for the 1958–2011 mean (50% grey).

And this adapted version of a figure in the paper by Al Rodger (here's his website full of climate graphs):

Al writes: "I scaled the data off the graph & produced a graph of rate of mass loss which shows the year October 2011-September 2012 has smashed through the 500 Gt/year barrier with a value of 570 Gt/year."

Yesterday I received an e-mail from climate journalist, film
maker and polar explorer Bernice Notenboom, the first Dutch woman to have reached the South Pole:

I am a polar explorer and in the spring of 2013 we plan to ski
from the North Pole to Ward Hunt Island on Ellesmere. We would
love to be part of a scientific project, but for funding
purposes it needs to be groundbreaking and innovative.

Given that we already have such good satellite data (IceSat,
Cryosat, etc.) it will be hard to press the scientists to
collaborate. My opinion is that we don't have enough
observations in the field during the winter/spring when the
Arctic ice is there. One area of interest to me is the
multi-year ice that is banked against the coast of Greenland and
Canada. We will enter this area around 84° of latitude and I was
wondering if you had any ideas what we could do there as we
cross it to Ward Hunt Island. What do you think would be
relevant to scientists and hasn't been done in the field? Mind
you, we are doing this trip pretty much unsupported, so we can't
lug heavy instruments or equipment with us.

A scientist at NASA suggested we should look at the aerosols
concentration above the Arctic skies -- with a small instrument
that records it. We could potentially establish a relationship
between the Arctic melt and aerosols concentrations.

Followed by this e-mail:

Also we are desperately looking for logistical support if
scientists are heading to the Arctic in spring 2013.

We would be interested to share costs with parties to the
North Pole, resupply at 86'30° and Ellesmere Island (Ward Hunt).
Departure around April 1 and pick up in Ellesmere middle of May.
That also would be of great help!

I doubt this is the end of the record streak, but as we approach the end of the year, this will probably be the final record domino of 2012. And what a fitting number to end it with!

The record fell over three weeks ago (see data). The reason I'm reporting it now is not just because I'm lazy or because the last time I called a maximum, I was heavily traumatized, but because I wanted to give WUWT and other fake skeptic blogs the chance to let their readers know about this new CT global sea ice area record, as they always invoke it to downplay the disappearance of Arctic sea ice. But somehow they're silent. How come, I say, how come?

I don't think combining the measurements of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice cover is particularly useful - it's like combining the weight of overweight and undernourished people and say: see, no hunger! - but it is an interesting statistic, and of course the trend is going down (albeit not as fast as Arctic SIA, due to a small positive trend in Antarctic SIA).